What is a Pivot Table in Excel?

Excel Pivot Tables are tables that summarise large amounts of data in an Excel spreadsheet. This is best explained by way of an example...

The spreadsheet below lists every sale that was made by a company during the first quarter of 2016. The spreadsheet records the sale date, the invoice reference, the invoice total, the name of the sales representative, and the sales region.

A

B

C

D

E

1

Date

Invoice Ref

Amount

Sales Rep.

Region

2

01/01/2016

2016-0001

$819

Barnes

North

3

01/01/2016

2016-0002

$456

Brown

South

4

01/01/2016

2016-0003

$538

Jones

South

5

01/01/2016

2016-0004

$1,009

Barnes

North

6

01/02/2016

2016-0005

$486

Jones

South

7

01/02/2016

2016-0006

$948

Smith

North

8

01/02/2016

2016-0007

$740

Barnes

North

9

01/03/2016

2016-0008

$543

Smith

North

10

01/03/2016

2016-0009

$820

Brown

South

11

...

...

...

...

...

An Excel pivot table can summarise the data in the above spreadsheet, to show the number entries or the sums of the values in any data column.

For example, the above pivot table on the right shows the total sum of all sales, for each of the four sales people, for the first quarter of 2016.

A more complex pivot table is shown below. In this pivot table, the sales totals are broken down by month for each sales person. The sales totals for each area are also shown.

A further feature of Excel pivot tables is the ability to quickly extract the data from any part of the pivot table.

For example, if you wanted to see a list of Brown's sales during January 2016, you would simply use the mouse to double click on the cell showing this value (the value $28,741 in the above example spreadsheet).

Excel then creates the new worksheet (shown below), listing Brown's sales during January 2016.

For the time being, don't worry about how the above pivot tables are produced. This section of the tutorial simply aims to answer the question "What is a Pivot Table in Excel?". We will learn how to create these pivot tables in the next few sections of this tutorial.